Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Saturday, December 18, 2010

Harry Potter Analogy

I wrote this over five years ago – it is even more appropriate today.

“The best”, wrote Yeats in 1919, “lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

July 7th 2005, terrorists murder 52 innocent men, women and children across the London transport network. July 9th my Rabbi brands the killers “thugs” and on the 11th of July a big, white East Ender, interviewed on the BBC defiantly proclaims that Muslims don’t kill other people, “it just doesn’t happen” he says, and, “Muslims are peace loving.”

This all reminds me of Harry Potter.

Dark Forces, seek world domination for their pure blooded followers. The Only Way. Humanity, divided between the righteous (Al Qaeda); and mud bloods (impure) and muggles (infidel). All of us on the wrong side have a purpose in this dark play. Our destiny, to demonstrate the awesome power Al Qaeda can deliver, without mercy. The good guys are so fearful of the evil that confronts them, they refuse to name it. They speak in codes, “he who must not be named,” one of unspeakable evil.

To point out that one may only fight that which one is able to name should be obvious. Until one names the name one cannot effectively face the threat – this is an axiom, so fundamental to survival, that to ignore it is to capitulate to terrorism.

Muslims do kill. Islam has exploded planes in mid air; committed acts of genocide in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Followers of the Islamic faith have stage-managed unspeakable atrocities across the globe; and yes, Muslims have blown up buses and trains in Spain, Israel, and now Britain. It may be a mutant strain of Islam; it may even be a cancer within the body of Islam. But it continues to preach its message of hate, and like Lord Voldemort, it sees its victims as inconsequential nobodies; to be sacrificed on the altar of Islamic destiny.

Muslims are the most prolific publishers of hate literature the world has seen. And what they sow we all shall reap. Their evil legacy, if it is not recognised, will eventually push mankind over the abyss and into hell.

The suicide bombers are gentrified murderers given a sanitized, politically correct title. They are not sad, misunderstood misanthropes, turned mad by a bad society. Their ends can never be justified by their means in spite of what the Tonge's, Blackwell’s, the Galloway’s and the Livingston’s may say to explain away their evil deeds. My Rabbi was wrong. They were not just thugs. They were, and they are, Islamically indoctrinated, nihilistic and religiously bigoted fascists. “Thugs” doesn’t cover the problem.

I do not write to demonize Islam. I do demonize those who would argue that Islam has a specific case. For by inference, the ends justify the means and that, in itself, removes morality from the discussion. We, all of us, around the world, have the right to self-determination, we all of us have the right to defend our homes, our families, and our own values. Once we start down the road to deligitimizing the humanity of those with whom we do not agree we expose ourselves to the very abuses we justify against others. The London bombings are the bloody legacy of this multicultural, liberal view and the Livingston’s and the Tonge’s are the political godparents of this mutant monster.

Jews in Britain have fences, security cameras and guards to exclude precisely those people we should be welcoming to our community. Double standards are what govern our relationship with the rest of society. Those same journalists, university lecturers, politicians and yes, church synods; so quick to condemn Israel, have never said a word to discourage the siege mentality that has engulfed British Jewry. All this “Us and Them” is meant to divide communities, not bring them together.

Walls and fences are the external manifestation of fear and insecurity. It weakens us. A theory for our time has it that where Jews feel comfortable, society thrives; where Jews feel fear, there is decline. Where Jews have fled, mediocrity and intellectual degeneration has been the result. Fed by fear, exclusion and emigration, Jewish numbers are already in terminal decline in the UK. The tradition of ethnic scapegoating is once more a barely restrained aspect of universal British culture whether it is practised towards Jews, Zionists or Israel. The democratic right to free speech has rarely been exercised responsibly. The demagoguery of the Ken Livingston’s and the Jenny Tonge’s (now Baroness Tonge) of this chaotic, blood soaked sphere is the antithesis of free speech. They represent the mob baying for blood, and Jewry, throughout the history of both Islam, and Christianity, has been its unifying target.

It starts with inflammatory speech that bares no ill will towards those of us who demonstrate politically correct (appropriately ambivalent Uncle Tom) tendencies and ends with tarnishing all of us with the same disdain dripping brush. A regrettable but inevitable result is that the momentum of historical determinism that the stereotypical bleeding heart liberal precipitates is the end of the Jewish community. Poland and much of the rest of Europe has begun, 60 years after the liberation of the camps, to nostalgically celebrate its Jewish past, a past that it actively collaborated with bringing to a tortured end. So why would Britain with Europe’s’ most vibrant Jewish populations be any different? Or even perhaps the USA?

Gloom and doom are the warning. This Britain is so poisoned by propaganda; the damage cannot be so easily undone. In the 21st century a call to altruism cannot persuade the bigots to turn away from prejudice and superstition. Not when they take comfort in its familiar smells, and bathe in its comfortingly recognizable language. It is time for the Jewish Community to express itself in terms of radical new ideas that everyone can understand, new arguments must be articulated. We should be taking a stand on every slight, perceived or apparent. Our discomfort must also be our enemies.